That-Has-Been
by ThisThatAndTheOther
Summary: Not long after the war is over, Thomas mulls over a photograph.


**Something very small. I'm on Tumblr now (Kindsokind, if you're interested), and found something... and then completely ignored the prompt. This was the outcome. When I figure out how to do stuff on that site (like, citing the picture that I used as inspiration, blah blah blah) it'll go up... I hope.  
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**Heavily influenced by Roland Barthes, particularly the use of "this-will-be" and "that-has-been" which are quotations from Camera Lucida.  
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**Written with wine and a chest cold, so good luck.**

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Sometimes, when the night was just right, Thomas could forget about everything. When the night sky was clear and the moon impossibly large, casting its cool gaze far across Downton, Thomas could feel at ease. These were stolen moments when he could see stars burning unfailingly above him – bright specks immeasurably far away in a sky under which Thomas could breathe deep lungfuls of crisp air from his window – alive and safe away from the Front.

And there were other times, when the moon overturned the sun and hid behind the covering of interlocking clouds, and the darkness of the cosmos settled over every surface and into every crevice – including Thomas it seemed. When shadows elongated and engorged until the outline of forms beyond his window were consumed, and an impenetrable black void yawned back at Thomas as he stood, at the precipice, awed and fearful under the oppressive expanse of night and what it promised.

These nights were almost humid in the way they clung to his body, suffocating and ruthless, and it always turned him towards the maudlin. Behind the security of his door – shut and fastened against intruders (though no one would ever call) – Thomas always found himself involuntarily moving towards his desk drawer and fishing for its false bottom. Here he kept his valuable (meagre) possessions and where a picture of Edward Courtenay was protected.

His own handwriting graced the front, dating the photograph to the time of the war – the very same year Edward had killed himself. It was a handsome picture, taken outside in the courtyard. Tightly cropped, it presented the blinded man seated and turned towards the left, staring out – possibly at Doctor Clarkson or a nurse – to something hidden beyond the frame. In his right hand he had he clutched the cane that he had begun to use when walking, to help him identify obstacles hidden by his sightless eyes. Even in sepia, the value-rich tones revealed the network of scars covering the delicate skin of his eyes.

Thomas had not been present when the photograph had been taken; his assistance had been needed elsewhere at the time, but he did remember that day well enough. The photographer, whose equipment and ego were cumbersome, had been constantly underfoot, making Thomas' and the nurses' jobs all the more difficult; it had been a trying day and Thomas had forced himself to be civil.

As his eyes circled the tight composition, he wished he had been there.

He wondered – as he always did – if Edward had known that he was the subject of such a photograph at the moment the shutter opened and the light of his image burned through the threads of the silver plating. Logically, Thomas knew he must have been, as the photographer had always asked for permission each time he captured the countless wounded men that day. Thomas had to still his tongue, as he had found perversity in ethics that allowed immortalising their suffering, justified by a quick swathe of (drug-addled) consent.

And yet, he could not force himself to discard this particular picture.

Each time he glanced at the image, Thomas fluctuated in his opinion, because he truly couldn't tell. Was Edward's posture, the far off and sightless gaze, the purse of his lips – even his grip on his cane – an artifice – a self-conscious and perhaps even rehearsed pose? Had he moulded and formed himself, knowingly and repeatedly, into a man other than himself for the viewer (for Thomas)?

Or, was he unaware of the camera's gaze, his image a borrowed icon permanently on loan to Thomas – something that was fundamentally Edward – a moment stolen and infused with such likeness of the man? Thomas sometimes thought it erotic, delicately driving his own desire beyond what he was ever permitted to see and feel when in the company of the actual, breathing, man.

The idea excited Thomas. It aroused him that something so essential to Edward was revealed to him – that Thomas was privy to something that had been secret to (maybe) even Edward – a portion of the man leaking through the paper and into Thomas' hands, where it seeped into his veins and was carried along to his heart.

But it was that detail – that he didn't know – that it could go either way – that tightened something within Thomas and burned indefinably in his chest – its sharp sting unavoidable.

Ultimately, it didn't matter. The image of the dead man was his to covet, as his finger – as it was wont to do – traced over the gently parted lips each time he looked. Edward, unknowingly, had become an object – a commodity – at Thomas' command to be seen and explored like a wound.

Edward was motionless here, forever looking out to something beyond the focus of the frame. Yet with each glance, Thomas felt the image grew in dynamism, as it stirred something deep within Thomas, feeding off of him. With each look, he afforded it a dignity – a gravitas that perpetually escaped him when he did (rarely) give in and touched himself. More often, Thomas would close his eyes as he pinched the corners of the photograph tightly and traced the contours of Edward's face with his mind. In this intimate moment, the wounded soldier was elevated, and Thomas tried to hold the vision within the confines of his mind – its sharpness, its impact heightened in memory – for as long as he could.

At times, Thomas wondered why the photographer had chosen that moment over all the others to immortalise on film. Not that it wasn't an attractive pose, but was it more desirous, more emotive, more _real_, than any other? Did it reveal to the world the delicate sensibilities and the inner workings of Edward's mind more than any other?

Thomas asked these questions time and again because he was trying to recognise Edward for what he was. He wanted to uncover and preserve the reality of the man as he once was. In his own way it was to protect the memory of him against the finality of death, but mostly, it was so that he could know what he had never been allowed to learn.

He was searching for the value of a man suspended in time, obstinately entrenched in the in-between: both alive and dead – alive within the reality of the photograph, living at the time the shutter was released, but dead within Thomas' reality; time was at once immobile and surging – the 'this-will-be' and 'that-has-been' conflated. Thomas, gratifyingly, felt like the keeper of time (and even the keeper of Edward, whose life and death sprawled infinitely outwards only when Thomas considered his photograph).

Other times, Thomas felt as though he were mad – mad for stealing the photograph, madder for keeping it, and maddest for continuously turning to it – for he had become trapped, just as much as Edward was bound by the photograph's restrictions. He no longer had the agency as viewer – as an untouched outsider – but rather he had been pulled into the delirium of the act; pulling out the photograph and staring at its matte surface had become a ritualised – fetishised – performance. It awakened in him an insatiable desire – circular in its longing – that failed to satisfy no matter how many times he reached for the picture and mapped the web of Edward's scars.

Desire stalled and repeated.

This repetition was fuelled by nostalgia, Thomas realised, for a time past – hazily internalised and privileged in memory – a time when Thomas didn't feel joy but _something_ – perhaps promise. Which was why Thomas didn't mind being stuck between the infinity of past and future; the present was too stifling. In fact, he revelled in the sensation of time – the silence of the clock – morbidly thinking of his own photographs and how, one day, he too would just be an object to be found and ratified, where boundaries would be gone – where past and future would meet, and someone, somewhere would feel a connection.


End file.
